A baking day and a gift

This morning was a baking day.  The warm sun has gone back to the South of France for a while leaving us with normal temperatures for March, a cool wind and an overcast sky.  Ian had weighed the flour out for the batch of bread last night and it was all lined up on the worktop.

I put my apron on, turned on the radio and began the deliciously slow process of making bread, interspersed with the not so slow process of making lemon cake for the holiday cottage visitors arriving this afternoon.  We have a leaven going for sourdough but this bread was the batch baking which produces six loaves, one for today and five for the freezer, which will keep us in home made bread for the week.

The mixer chuntered away to itself, the dough hook taking the hard work out of kneading, while I lined tins with greaseproof paper for the lemon cake and grated lemon zest.  On the radio, Sandi Toksvig was visiting Iceland which seems to have the most astonishingly full and creative arts scene for such a tiny population.

The dough went into its bowls to rise and I creamed butter and sugar and lemon zest and tried hard not to stick my finger in the mixture.  Soon the cakes were in the oven and the kitchen filled with a warm lemony smell.  My father in law came in from his daily walk up the drive to our post box.  This is one of his particular jobs now, bringing the post down, and he was pleased that he had a parcel for me.

As soon as I saw the French postmark I knew it was from Stephanie at Millefeuilles.  If you haven't visited her blog, do go and read.  The word "delight" is an overused one I think and so it is a word that I use rarely but Stephanie's blog is a delight: sensitive, erudite, amusing and intensely feminine.  And I had won her giveaway and this was it!

I loved the beautiful card and the wrapping paper even before I had opened the parcel.

Inside an English translation of Charles Perrault's Complete Fairy Tales and

the tale of Peau d'ane (in French, let's hope my French comes back to me!) exquisitely illustrated by Miss Clara.  It is delicately beautiful, each illustration a work of art in itself.

Thank you so much Stephanie.  I have promised myself that I will try to read it in French first before any sneaky cheating with the translation.  The last of these pictures with the girl in the fabulous dress sitting in the turkey shed makes me smile every time I look at it.  We are having some French visitors to stay in May as part of the twinning arrangements between our local town and a small French town in Brittany.  Bravely or foolishly, we have yet to find out,  we have agreed to host a couple who have very little English so how timely to have some French to read.  I wonder what kind of conversations we will have if all of my recent French has come from reading fairy tales?

Carefully setting my new treasures aside I went back to baking.  The bread was on its second rising in its tins and the lemon cake went in and came out of the oven.

What a good morning.

A year in the life of a tree

Esther at Esthersboringgardenblog, who should be sued under the Trade Descriptions's Act for interestingness, has been hosting a group of us who have been recording a year in the life of a tree.  I have to admit that I have been pretty hopeless at this.  There was so little change in February that I couldn't bring myself to blog about it. Let me show you what I mean:

Here is a fat bud at the end of January.

And here it is at the end of February.  You can perhaps see how I might have felt I had nothing to say.

But March has been warm, even hot, and sunny and just plain gorgeous.  From a distance as you walk across the field and look up at the horse chestnut you are not sure whether it is in leaf or not.

But get closer and you can see that the whole tree is opening up and out.

On the North side of the tree the buds are bursting.

But on the South side they are offering themselves to the world,

throwing wide their arms,

even thinking of flowering, sometime, soon.

Spring has sprung and the tree is on the move.

Garden life

I wonder if there are people out there whose house and garden always look the same and who thus don't need to tidy up for visitors.  What a perfect world that would be: the kitchen floor would always be clean, the flower beds would always be weed free and there would never be piles of electrical gubbins on the kitchen table.  I'd love to live like that but in order to achieve it I would have to move house to a small and perfectly formed modern flat, divorce my delightful husband and live meanly by myself, stop having cats and chickens and trying to run two acres of garden, a holiday cottage and numerous outbuildings.  I might be able to manage a small and perfectly formed balcony.  I think I might be saying that in order to achieve it I would have to live someone else's life.

This week Karen and Kate came to visit and it was really lovely to see them.  Did I say I love having visitors?  However as a result I spent days before their arrival weeding, and yes Karen and Kate, I know it didn't look like it.  You should have seen it before is all I can say.  Ian also took the electrical gubbins off the table.

I love spring.  I can feel the energy and warmth which drives green leaves up through the bare soil driving me outside.  And this is a beautiful spring.  The daffodils are crowding around the apple tree and the swing.

When I started planting daffodils up here I was going to be very disciplined: the native Welsh daffodil around the orchard trees (narcissus obvallaris) and Thalia up by the swing.  Since then I discovered that there were some daffodils here already around the quince tree and I changed my mind.   I have rather surprised myself by falling in love with daffodils and buying more and more.  Now I have Jack Snipe by the drive:

 and a lot of February Gold by the swing.

 I have some sweetly scented jonquils, aptly named Sweetness, and some lovely old doubles, Telamonius,  These have been growing in cottage gardens since the early seventeenth century when this house was built.

It seems that daffodils have to be quite small to appeal to me, with a neat flower or swept back petals.  For the first time this year there are enough in the soon to be orchard to spread and dance.  This year I shall colonise the bottom of the field, perhaps with Cedric Morris if I can find it, or Jenny or Pipit.

But the best bit of the garden just now is the side garden where pulmonaria Blue Ensign and Diana Clare sit with tiny Praestans tulips, Fusilier,  side by side in a singing smile of colour.

And the rest of the side garden is beginning to bulk up with the foliage of aquilegia, day lilies, foxgloves and newly emerging geraniums and peonies.

To complete the picture of garden life, here is evidence of the mass break out of hens from our attempt to keep them confined, although confined in a pretty large area of grass and trees.  These two weren't having it and made their presence felt on the wall outside the kitchen door.

And there is quite a lot of stuff in the field which is not daffodils but machinery, waiting to go back into the new barn.

It all depends on where you point the camera!

Miscellany

All sorts of things are crowding for attention here on the blog after a few days when my laptop died and went away to be resuscitated.  (Thank you Alison of the Allyway).  It's just like a car breaking down: one moment you are taking it entirely for granted and the next you realise that your whole life is built around having access to it.  It showed the blue screen of death and I began to prepare myself for its funeral but Alison not only retrieved all my data but got the whole thing working again, slicker than ever.

So here is a canter through some of things that have been happening.

I spent a few days down in Devon with my parents.  It was that beautiful week when the sun shone so warm that the smell of spring was everywhere.  My sister and I, with my son and his wife, took the dogs up onto Dartmoor one afternoon.  The grass was not yet greening up on the moor but the stream was brown and clear like whisky.

There was swimming to be done if you were a dog.

The air was still and soft and Dartmoor rolled away into the haze.

At home we were experimenting with sourdough bread.  Ian had been creating a leaven, feeding it daily with flour and water and watching it bubble magically into life.

You can take from it every day to provide the raising agent for a new loaf.  The whole process is slow and gentle and the loaf itself needs to be left to rise for plenty of time, occasionally gently and quickly kneaded.

This is the bread I made from Dan Lepard's The Handmade Loaf.  I was going to take a picture of the loaf all baked and beautiful before I cut it but it looked and smelt so good that I inadvertently ate quite a bit of it first.

And yesterday I did a great sowing of euphorbia seeds.  At the end of last year I was lucky enough to meet Don Witton, who is the brother of one of our walking friends.  Don holds the national collection of euphorbias in his garden and allotments in Yorkshire.  We were on a walk with a group of friends and Don and I chatted and talked gardens and plants.  A few days later a packet appeared through the post containing the seeds of seven different types of euphorbia and a book he had written on euphorbias for the Hardy Plant Society.  Kate at Beangenie was blogging only the other day about the generosity of gardeners and here is another prime example!

So the seeds of Euphorbia griffithii have gone into the freezer for stratification and all of the others have gone into seed trays and into a heated propagator.  I have never grown euphorbia from seed and am still a very novice seed sower in general so I am not holding my breath.  If I only get one or two seedlings that will be exciting enough.  There is so much more to do and so many more seeds to sow!

Sunday evening

Outside my window  the moon is riding high and clear in the night sky.  I stood at the door  half an hour ago and heard an owl hooting from further up the valley and a fox barking.  I hope the hens are tucked safely away for the night.

I am thinking   of all the things to do in the garden and of the need to get my own laptop fixed.  I am writing this on Ian's laptop while mine displays the black screen of death.  Have I everything backed up on memory stick?  What do you think?

From the kitchen   comes the smell of white thyme bread.  Ian has been experimenting with sour dough bread again and today I had a go with the natural leaven.  If you haven't come across this before, it is a way of creating leaven using the natural yeasts in the atmosphere.  The process of making the leaven takes a few days but when you have it you can take from it every day and keep the leaven alive for as long as you wish.  It produces a bread with a flavour and texture which is totally distinctive.  I shall blog in more detail about sourdough when I have my own laptop and some photographs.  Today I made a bread with fresh thyme and green olives which is just delicious and as different from shop bought bread as  good wine is from coca cola.

I am reading   Beth Chatto's "A Woodland Garden" given to me three years ago by Zoe when I first started contemplating making my native tree walk.  Some gardening books are instructional and some are inspirational.  This one is a book I keep coming back to, loving the careful clear prose and the ideas which it provokes.   No matter how many times I read it something new always comes out of reading it again.

I am thankful for   the fact that Ian has disposed of the Scots Dumpy cockerel (apologies to those of a sensitive disposition).  He looked beautiful but he had taken to attacking me every time I went in to collect eggs or feed chickens.  Peace reigned today in the chicken run.

I have just finished   a piece of white thyme bread with salty Welsh butter.  Bliss.

Thanks to Pondside for the format.   I enjoyed her blog based on this so much that I have pinched the idea.

Doing and thinking

It has been two weeks since I blogged!  I can't remember when that last happened.  My time and my head have been full of a whirl of travel and commitments.  Time to pause for breath and make a list, a list of things to do in the coming week and a list of things not to do as well perhaps.
To do:

1. Go to yoga.  Have you noticed that the time when you need things most is often when you let them go?  Yoga makes me feel better, calmer and fractionally bendier.  I haven't been since Christmas and I know that when I don't go for a while I will find it hard to settle down to it, hard to slow down, hard to let myself go.  This probably means that I should go.
2. Plan my cutting garden.  Because of all sorts of family and work pressures I am way behind with all sorts of things.  I have today sowed some salvia, some verbena bonariensis, some violas and some poppies.  A couple of weeks ago I did manage to sow my sweetpeas, choosing Sarah Raven's light and dark mixes as all her sweetpeas have very good scent.  What I need to do now is to decide how the cutting garden as a whole should work. 
3. Walk.  Every day this week I shall walk for an hour. I love walking and the rhythm of putting one foot in front of the other always makes me feel good.  Add to that the slow wakening of the landscape to spring around me and what better way can there be to spend an hour?
4. Bake.  I love baking.  I simply have to decide between making something I can do with my eyes closed (cheese scones, coffee cake, apple cake) and something new which needs a recipe.  Something new I think.

And not to do?

1. Think.  This is an odd one for me.  I am a believer in thinking, in analysing, in being rational, in challenging overwhelming feelings with thought, but sometimes the mind is stilled by not thinking.  I wonder if I can do it?  Let us see if I can do instead.